New Year's

by John Hughes

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1961

New Year’s is great! You can stay up as late as you please and drink too much pop and do whatever you want because your parents go out and when they come home they’re too drunk to notice what you’ve done and in the morning they feel so terrible they don’t care. You’ve got plenty of energy (after a close brush with sleep at about 11:30), and when midnight rolls around, you go out on the porch and scream as loud as you can and blow off the firecracker you’ve saved from July 4th. You knock over garbage cans, blow on your cornet, play records full blast, and start up your mom’s car and floor it and honk the horn. When you get cold or tired, you go inside and make a frozen pizza, watch a double bloody slime monster ghoul movie, and fall asleep on the floor.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1964

New Year’s better be good because Christmas was boring and stupid and your grandfather bugged you about your “Beatle hair” and school starts again in two days. You walk three miles over to a friend’s house and have a party but no girls show up. You smoke some cigarettes and drink two cans of beer and you get drunk. At midnight, you do about the same thing you did last year and the year before, but this time you feel stupid and immature. Then you start to feel sad and lonely and wish you were sixteen so you could get your license and buy a car and work at a gas station and be friends with the Dave Clark Five and quit school, and then you get to thinking about how much better your sister’s Christmas presents were than yours and you’re convinced your parents don’t love you as much as they love her and then you feel sick and go home. When you get into bed , you whack off, noting that it is your first one for 1965.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1966

You've got your license and your mom's Country Squire. You load it up with as many guys as it will hold and two cases of Blatz beer. Then you go back to your house and everybody gets drunk. Some girls come by and you don't get one. You feel extremely sorry for yourself, and when you go to take a leak, you look at yourself in the minor for half an hour trying to figure out everything that's wrong with you. At midnight, nothing happens. In fact, it's almost twelve-thirty before you notice. Then it's time to get everyone out of the house, and that means driving fifteen people home. The last one in the car is a girl, but before you even have a chance to think about doing something to her, she throws up. You get home and clean the barf off the side of the car. And as you walk into the house, you glance up at the moon and think dark, gloomy thoughts until you realize that you've ruined your neat new Christmas sheepskin coat with beer.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1968

It's your first time home from college and you can't wait to show your old high school flame how cool college has made you, but she already has plans and a new boyfriend. You call your old high school buddies and go downtown with them and 800,000 other people. You smoke lots of hash and drink Southern Comfort until you're wrecked, and at midnight, you've got your shirt off and you're screaming, “End the war!” to the TV cameras. You hope that your old flame sees you on TV in the freezin cold with your shirt off and feels sorry for you. On the way home, you start blubbering about “her” until every body’s “bummed out.” When you drop your old friends off, you give the peace sign and say, “Hey, we're all brothers, man.” But you don't really mean it and you don’t care if you ever see them again because they’ve changed and you’ve changed and you go inside and put on your headphones and listen to Blonde on Blonde.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1973

You’ve finished college, you’ve proposed to a girl and the two of you are going out with her parents for a New Year’s dinner at a French restaurant. You don’t know shit from shamrocks about French food and your future mother-in-law orders for you and you feel like Mr. Lardhead. You begin to notice massive differences between you and your fiancée. You shriek when dessert comes because it’s on fire and everyone has a hearty laugh at your expense. After dinner, you swing over to some posh watering hole for a nightcap with a bunch of lawyers and real estate sharpies. On the ride home, you seriously wonder if you’re marrying the right girl, if you’re marrying too young, if you’re marrying into the wrong kind of family. When you say good-night, you accidentally say good-bye and deep down you mean it and you end up at 3:00 A.M. in a bar spilling your guts to a drunk bleached-blond grandmother.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1977

You stand firm behind your decision to stay home for New Year’s. You and your wife agree that New Year’s is overrated and that no one ever has a good time. You pour a couple of drinks, cuddle up, and watch a movie. After the movie, she makes onion dip, you make more drinks, and she whips your ass at gin. After cards she gets into her pajamas you get into the Scotch. When midnight comes, you’re looped. You hear the celebration on TV as you sit on the toilet reading a Saks’ Christmas flyer. When you come out to kiss the wife, you find her in a dead sleep. You try to imagine what life would be like if you’d married one of your slutty girl friends instead of good old Miss America over there on the couch. You make a dozen desperately sad phone calls to old friends and sip Johnny Walker Red from a jelly glass. You finally conclude that you are an old turd, your life is a cow pie, and then you make forced love to the wife and go to bed.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1982

Despite the fact that nearly every single New Year’s celebration in your whole life has been miserable, you decide to give it one more try, and you and your wife go out to dinner with a dentist friend and his brother-in-law and his wife. You’re in a lousy restaurant with a silly little hat on your head, listening to a sweaty broad sing and eating semi-warm Surf ‘n’ Turf. The brother-in-law asks you not to smoke and his wife tells you how bad drinking is for you. At midnight you go back to the dentist’s house. You meet his parents, who are up from Fort Lauderdale for the holidays. As you drive the baby-sitter to her house, you're tempted to pull over and shove the pork in her face, but you realize that she’d only think you were old and gross. As you lie in bed, you wonder how long it will be before you die. You resolve to give up smoking, drinking, and eating, and you pray for the first time since high school.

NEW YEAR'S EVE 1990

You and your wife go to the club for dinner with some old friends and talk about New Years’ past and how no one ever has any fun on New Year’s. However, you all agree that it would be a “gas” to go “boogie” again. So you pile into your electric Toyota-Benz and go downtown to a place you’ve heard your kids talk about. It takes you almost an hour before you realize that you’re all making monstrous fools of yourselves, and you exit to stares and rude comments. When you get home, the wife goes to bed and you have a few drinks and wait up for your daughter to come home. When she walks in at 3:00 A.M., you’re plowed and weeping about how you wished you’d been a writer or a painter and how you’ve wasted your life, and she helps you upstairs. You promise yourself not to celebrate New Year’s again as long as you live, which won’t be too long be cause you don’t get enough exercise and you eat too many fatty foods.